Chapter 1 – Desiring Elsewhere
Desiring Elsewhere explores the possibilities of utopian thinking through embodied practice, performance and queer imagination. This chapter approaches utopia not as a distant abstraction, but as a lived, felt, and performable horizon – offering strategies that help to navigate contemporary political pressures and oppressive climates. At its core, it examines how desire, movement and play can enact alternative realities, stretch temporal and spatial frameworks, and challenge fixed ontologies and epistemologies. Curated around the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and his seminal text Cruising Utopia, chapter 1 traces movement and thought through which desires for different bodies, affective possibilities and erotic modes of being are articulated. Desiring Elsewhere emphasises the plasticity of the body, the playfulness of performative action, and the radical potential of experimentation. Dreaming and playing emerge here as deliberate, embodied strategies – moments in which bodies stretch beyond normative constraints and enact speculative visions of possible worlds. In this chapter, utopia is both political and intimate: a vision of futures that are at once desired and performed, speculative yet materially experienced.
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Desiring Elsewhere explores the possibilities of utopian thinking through embodied practice, performance and queer imagination. This chapter approaches utopia not as a distant abstraction, but as a lived, felt, and performable horizon – offering strategies that help to navigate contemporary political pressures and oppressive climates. At its core, it examines how desire, movement and play can enact alternative realities, stretch temporal and spatial frameworks, and challenge fixed ontologies and epistemologies. Curated around the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and his seminal text Cruising Utopia, chapter 1 traces movement
About
Moving Discourse is a media platform dedicated to performative thinking and choreographic practice. Through video and text, it both cinematically portrays and theoretically engages with performance, movement, and the body. Every month, Moving Discourse releases a curated chapter on a specific topic, combining interviews, performance documentations, and experimental texts.
As its name suggests, Moving Discourse can be understood as a call to action. It invites us to move the discourse, to transdisciplinarily question fixed assumptions and unsettle hardened arguments. It is both a space to display movement-based artistic practices and a field to engage with the theoretical currents that surround them.
Moving Discourse seeks to hold and to release — to establish an archive of ideas and of the bodies that carry them, while refusing all attempts at solidification. It embraces the fluidity of forms, the impermanence of gestures, and dynamic thinking, in order to keep discourse itself in motion.
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